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She has the loft to herself. Entirely to herself. It’s a dream come true—a dream so longstanding that she practically feels her hair getting shorter, her hair turning that dark don’t fucking talk to me shade of burgundy she favored the first time he ushered her into the Bat Cave.
Except this time there is no Martha in some nuclear green clay facial mask and a cheetah-print kurta. There’s no baby faced Alexis reminding him of his manners, and there’s no him with his sticking-up hair and total lack of self-consciousness about the laser tag goggles perched on the top of his head.
There’s no one, and she has plans for snooping. It’s ridiculous. She lives there. She has, for all intents and purposes, lived there for years at this point. But she still wants to snoop his books. She wants to pop the back out of every picture frame and take a tour through the history of updates. She wants to see his Nineties Dad hair and baggy clothes. She wants to see toothless, gawky Alexis and exactly how ageless Martha is.
She wants to turn over tchotchkes and make up her own stories about where they came from. She wants to weigh them in her hands and try to guess how obscenely expensive or comically cheap they are, because his things run the gamut. The things they have all accumulated truly do and she’s achingly curious about every one of those things.
She also has plans for sprawling. She wants to stretch out on the thick pile rug with the trashy magazines he, for some unfathomable reason, tries to hide at random intervals within his architecturally unsound piles of largely unread New Yorkers. As if she doesn’t know he reads trashy magazines. As if he doesn’t announce he reads trashy magazines on a regular basis. She has definitely plans for that stash for that carpet and for every piece of furniture she usually has to share with him, with laundry, with her piles of case files and his piles of things he should be editing.
Her plans are many and detailed. They are both elaborate and entirely without a schedule. And they come crashing down around her ears the minute the door swings open.
The place is empty. Not empty empty—it’s still filled with tchotchkes and books and not-at-all-secret stashes of glossy garbage. It’s full of things that need snooping and surfaces that need sprawling on, but it’s empty, like every molecule of air, every square inch of of the black, black windows knows he’s gone for two more days, that Martha is at her new place and Alexis on the very brink of change of address cards. It’s empty and the spoiled-only-child night she thought she’d been longing for holds no appeal at all.
She lets her coat drop to the floor. She kicks off a shoe and hits Buddha square in the ear. The other shoe sails over his topknot and on to the first landing. She drags herself to the fridge and figures she can, at the very least, eat her feelings, preferably right out of the oldest, most questionable carton of leftovers inside.
But there are no leftovers. It’s stocked with the fruit she likes, the yogurt she likes, with a veritable fortress of Tupperware filled with her favorite things from his kitchen repertoire—the full range from fancy to healthy to constructed on a base layer of cheese food product that he only allows her to eat once quarterly.
She does’t know when he did it. She doesn’t know when he would have had time to do it. The trip was last minute. He’d been up late packing and off to the airport at the crack of dawn, hand’t he? She’d stumbled in late and exhausted herself and she’d not even sure she remembers a goodbye kiss.
She shuts the fridge, his offering untouched. She leans, forehead first, against the cool stainless steel and feels the emptiness of the place pressing in on her. She’s lonely. It’s an absolutely stupid development, but she is profoundly lonely.
She levers herself upright. She retrieves her shoe from the landing, the other from behind Buddha. She hangs up her coat like a nominal grown up. She heads for the bedroom and his dirty laundry hamper. That’s less grown up. She rifles through it, pitching button-downs behind her. He changes those like six times a day. They smell like soap and aftershave. They smell nothing like him, and the bastard had better not have packed what she’s looking for.
He hasn’t. She comes up with it at the very bottom—a grey t-shirt that passes for ratty considering it’s his. He sleeps in it some nights. He cooks in it. He makes her coffee in it and reads his trashy magazines in it. She holds it tight in her fist and can’t bear to let it go, even as she strips off her work clothes. She kicks them into a pile and lifts her arms high. She savors the feeling of the cotton skimming over her wrists, past her shoulders, settling on her bare hips.
She closes her eyes and breathes in the scent of him. She opens her eyes and he’s there, standing two feet away.
“Castle,” she shrieks. Or she would have shrieked if she were the kind of person who shrieks. “I—you—what?” She feels a blush sweeping over her, starting with the soles of her feet. “I—what? I was’t . . . “ She’s holding the shirt away from her body like it’s radioactive.
“You were.” The look on his face is a mixture of amusement and hunger that’s definitely going to get him killed. A little later, it’s going to get him killed. Right now, it’s just going to get him in trouble, as he steps in close. “It’s okay, Beckett. You should see what I get into of yours when you’re gone.”